Content management tools fail, Plone marches on

A Jupiter study — I'm usually highly sceptical of these, but hey, maybe they're right for once — says businesses are often dissatisfied with their content management solutions. Complexity, lock-in, overengineering, ridiculous prices abound.

Meanwhile, in Plone land: Plone Improvement Process (a formalized approach to improvements: this sort of thing seems to be pretty popular in the larger free software projects these days, have you noticed?) has a few interesting improvement proposals for an already fine system: Oslo Skin system and Navigation and validation rewrite.

These coupled with improvements to and integration of CMFTypes and possibly the brand spanking new TTWType promise a bright future. It's not perfect and probably not suitable to all situations (there's a clear community site bias, but it doesn't have to be used that way) but it is easy, powerful and has a lot of momentum. And clearly there's still lots of space in the CMS field to conquer. Zope 3 is coming, but this Zope 2 thing is nowhere near its end of life.